In the process of refurbishing this old post on the Beatles and piracy, I stumbled across this NME article from 2013: according to an industry group, The Beatles are the most pirated musical act. MUSO, who released the data to Music Week, revealed 186,876 files featuring The Beatles music have been removed from the internet […]

DEVIN McKINNEY • Note: These are not new impressions, but ones jotted down in May 2012, the day Early Takes: Volume 1 came in the mail, and embellished more recently. George, in a photo taken in a Bahamian pool during the filming of Help!, holds his head above the water’s crystal surface, his face the […]

DEVIN McKINNEY • What a bounty this autumn brings us. In addition to the long (as in loooong) awaited first volume of the Lewisohn biography (the multiple iterations of which will blanket like sweet snow our Fall and Winter); Kevin Howlett’s The Beatles: BBC Archives 1962 to 1970, which looks indispensable for the cover alone; […]

One of my dreams for this site has been setting up a page for each UK album, then collecting all the available session recordings on YouTube, plus outtakes and remixes, and putting it in that one place. Organized chronologically, so that scholars could reconstruct the process by which the songs came to be—all the minute […]

The first sign that this bootleg is a bit weirder than usual is the cover—not the straightforward band photo used on many bootlegs of this show, which features Paul in a remarkably hideous pink shirt. That whoever put together this cover thought it would be cool to paste a square-shaped snapshot of Linda’s head over […]

DEVIN McKINNEY • Mike said he’d be curious to see this (see comments to “The best cover” below). It was purchased in a bodega on a dusty side street in Ariquipa, Peru, late 1990s. Far from the strangest item in my Beatles closet, but far from the least interesting. (I should specify: This is not […]

This collection, up for sale on eBay through Saturday, lives up to its title. It’s definitely the most comprehensive Beatles and Beatles-related one I’ve ever seen. There are records I’ve seen only in Bruce Spizer’s books, like McCartney’s “Walking in the Park with Eloise,” what looks like a full run of the “Lost Lennon Tapes” […]

Here are some photos from Retronaut.com — the last photo of John and Paul — taken at Peter Lawford’s old beach house here in Santa Monica. Whenever I want to bask in some ghosts (Marilyn and Jack! Marilyn and Bobby! Nilsson and Baron Von Moon!) I bike down six blocks; the house is right on the […]

This Beatles image is from the wall opposite Bleecker Bob’s record store at the corner of 3rd and MacDougal in Greenwich Village. I took it this past spring, just after buying a copy of the “Black Album” (comprised of Let it Be session bootlegs). Now Bleecker Bob’s is, lamentably, about to close, another casualty of lagging interest […]

[Update August 2013: I just found this elegant little video from a group trying to discourage music piracy. It’s Beatles-authorized, and makes the point that “[l]oving The Beatles is a shared experience.” And I’d add a sweet, life-affirming one, too. How many of those do we have anymore? That’s why we do Dullblog.] As an […]